“It is a common remark,” says Kay, “of the operatives of Lancashire, and one which is only too true: ‘Your church is a church for the rich, but not for the poor. It was not intended for such people as we are.’ The Roman church is much wiser than the English in this respect.… It is singular to observe how the priests of Romanist (sic) countries abroad associate with the poor. I have often seen them riding with the peasants in their carts along the roads, eating with them in their houses, sitting with them in the village inns, mingling with them in their village festivals, and yet always preserving their authority.”[252]
With us, too, the masses of the people are fast abandoning Protestantism. There is no Catholic country in Europe in which the social condition of the masses is so wretched as in England, the representative Protestant country. For three hundred years, it may be said, the Catholic Church had no existence there. The nation was exclusively under Protestant influence; and yet the lower classes were suffered to remain in stolid ignorance, until they became the most degraded population in Christendom.
“It has been calculated,” says Kay, writing in 1850, “that there are at the present day, in England and Wales, nearly 8,000,000 persons who cannot read and write.” That was more than half of the whole population at that time. But this is not the worst. A population ignorant of reading and writing may nevertheless, to a certain extent, be educated through religious teaching and influence; but these unhappy creatures were left, helpless and hopeless, to sink deeper and deeper beneath the weight of their degradation, without being brought into contact with any power that could refine or elevate them; and if their condition has somewhat improved in the last quarter of a century, this is no more to be attributed to Protestantism than the Catholic Emancipation Act or the Atlantic cable.
THE SEVEN FRIDAYS IN LENT
First, thy most holy Passion, dearest Lord,
Doth set the keynote of our love and tears;
And then thy holy Crown of Thorns appears—
Strange diadem for thee, of lords the Lord!
The holy Lance and Nails we clasp and hoard: